Forest fires in Siberia and the Far East: Emissions and atmospheric transport of black carbon to the Arctic

Based on official statistical data from the Federal Forestry Agency of the Russian Federation, we estimated the black carbon (BC) emissions to the atmosphere from forest fires on the territory of Siberia and the Far East for the period 2000–2013. Statistical data on different fire types (crown and creeping fires, fires on nonforested and deforested lands), their seasonal and interannual variations are taken into consideration. We estimated distributions of BC emissions for different fire types over federal districts; total emissions from the territory of Siberia and the Far East had been (27 ± 8) kt/yr, the dispersion of annual values being from 3.5 to 94 kt. The 14-year average spatial distributions of fire-related BC emissions on (1° × 1°) grid for each season are used to calculate the wildfire contributions to BC content in environment of different regions of the Asian coast of the Arctic Ocean. It is shown that the Asian coast of the Russian Arctic receives much (over an order of magnitude) more anthropogenic black carbon than black carbon from wildfires, with anthropogenic emissions exceeding fire emissions of black carbon on the territory of Siberia and the Far East by a factor of five.